Mother, Please! - By Brenda Novak & Jill Shalvis & Alison Kent Page 0,63

the Tatem, Texas, football-field sidelines wearing their high school mascot’s tornado costume.

A tornado she’d always thought looked more like an upside-down soft-serve cone than a threatening storm—even if later, she admitted, the threat had been real. For all she knew, it still was. He made her nervous—another admission she couldn’t afford not to make, just as she couldn’t afford not to keep her wits about her. Their history left her less than certain where she stood with him today.

He’d been just as maddening fifteen years ago as he was now, but from age eight to eighteen he’d been nothing but a muddle of arms and legs and freckles who’d bugged the crap out of her and the rest of her friends with his stupid jokes and lame attempts to get her attention.

Now he was all broad chest and six-pack abs, with a disheveled head of thick, sandy-brown hair, fans of crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, a short sexy goatee, and a really fine backside that…

“What are you doing?” she asked, pulling the basket of croissants away from his greedy, groping fingers.

“Looking for breakfast. I’m wasting away to nothing in here.” He wiggled both brows in a suggestive way that drove her nuts. “And you know how I feel about your buns.”

Oh, good grief. “You have way too much meat on your bones to be starving,” she said, blushing as his eyes grew all sleepy looking when she knew he wasn’t the least bit tired. She pushed past him into the kitchen that would’ve been classified as sixties retro if it hadn’t been the original decor. With all the changes her mother was making these days, Avery wouldn’t be surprised to find a kitchen makeover next on the list.

Why in the world Suzannah had ever rented the top-floor apartment to David was a bone of contention Avery hadn’t quit gnawing. Her mother claimed that David, now Suzannah’s colleague on the faculty at Tatem High, deserved to feel at home, returning as he had to West Texas, to the town he’d left on the heels of scandal, to teach the high school’s one and only computer science class.

Avery agreed in theory. She couldn’t imagine a better mentor for the high school’s whiz kids than Tatem’s team mascot-cum-resident geek. But in practice…no. David did not deserve to feel at home when she was at the root of that old scandal and when the home in question was hers. Or at least above hers.

And when getting to his home meant sharing the same staircase and having to pass each other between the first and second floors. A staircase that really was much too narrow for a man as broad as David Marks.

He shut the kitchen door behind her, and a shiver of intuitive apprehension told her that walking through her mother’s living room of roses and mahogany and chintz and up the stairs to her own apartment before either of them said another word would be the smartest thing she could do. He made her uneasy in ways she hadn’t taken time to define since he’d moved in ten months ago, and she feared that lapse would prove to be her undoing.

Then he flipped the dead bolt, locking the back door. She lifted one brow in question and tried to breezily add, “That’s really not necessary, you know.”

He shrugged, obviously not sharing her opinion. She further pled her case. “There hasn’t been an incident of breaking and entering in Tatem since Buck Ester climbed the trellis to propose and crashed through Yvette Lapp’s bedroom window.”

Long lashes sweeping slowly down then back up, David shrugged and headed toward her. “Better safe than sorry, I always say.”

See? This was why she didn’t like having him here. He said things like that to make her crazy. Now she wanted to ask about his years away but couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. She’d promised her mother that she wouldn’t bring up the past that had driven David away from Tatem in the first place and now, fifteen years later, had brought him back.

She set the bread basket on the white-and-gold-flecked Formica top of her mother’s old aluminum-legged kitchen table. David dropped to his back on the floor and wormed the upper half of his body up into the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink.

“What are you doing here anyway?” she asked, though the answer was fairly obvious, and her question was actually more a case of wondering why.

“I ran into your mother this morning when I went out for